Lucia Wilcox: LUCIA, Berry Campbell Gallery, New York

Thu 22 May 2025 to Sat 28 Jun 2025

524 W 26th Street, NY 10001

Tue-Sat 10am-6pm

She was a true Surrealist...constantly letting all we know emerge from her subconscious. Thus reinventing herself every few minutes.
- Phyllis Braff, Independent Critic and Curator

Berry Campbell Gallery presents its first exhibition of the work of Lucia Wilcox (1899–1974), whose extraordinary life began with her youth in Beirut and unfolded at the center of the Paris and New York art worlds. Residing in East Hampton from the 1940s onward, Lucia Wilcox served as a vital link between European émigrés, such as Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy, and Abstract Expressionists, such as Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and Elaine and Willem de Kooning. With solo exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery in the late 1940s and Leo Castelli Gallery in the early 1970s, the New York Times described her life in 1973 as “intertwined in the history of twentieth-century art.” This marks the first exhibition of Lucia Wilcox’s work by the gallery after announcing the representation of her Estate.

Lucia Wilcox: LUCIA focuses on her vividly hued and wildly imaginative Surrealist works from 1939 to 1949. Known professionally as “Lucia” (she was married three times), she referenced Fauvism, Primitivism, and Symbolism, creating Surrealist compositions that stood apart for their joyous embrace of life, freedom, and sensual pleasures. She often used the female nude—along with color and line—to construct a realm of uninhibited sensual pleasure, drawing inspiration at times from Henri Matisse. However, in ironic and tongue-in-cheek depictions, she transformed traditional tropes of female angels, reclining nudes, and dancers—often emblems in works by male artists (including Matisse) of women’s ethereality and sexuality—into affirmations of women’s freedom and pleasure. These “fantasyscapes” pose an understated feminist challenge to a Surrealist ethos in which male artists often used women as muses and mediums for visions laced with erotic violence and hallucinations. Like other women associated with Surrealism—including Gertrude Abercrombie, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Kay Sage, and Remedios Varo—Lucia found a voice in Surrealism in the 1940s, a time when as Whitney Chadwick notes in Women, Art, and Society (1990), women artists replaced such ideologies “with an art of magical fantasy and narrative flow.”

While the dreamlike lyricism of Lucia’s work often evokes that of Marc Chagall, she expressed an exuberant zest for life in the moment—contrasting with Chagall’s frequent retreat into memory and spiritual longing. “Painting is your own reflection,” Lucia stated in 1948. “It is a handwriting, a personal speech. I paint because I have to paint and this is my only way of writing poetry.” The ideology shines forth in works such as Jungle Path (1946), in which tiger-like creatures and human faces are growing within a dense tropical landscape. A wide-eyed lion stares toward the viewer, evoking the lion in Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910, Museum of Modern Art, New York). But here, the creature does not threaten; rather, it invites the viewer to enter a mystical space where boundaries among human, nature, and the environment dissolve—symbolically rejecting hierarchies that undergird patriarchal structures. Lucia likely drew the swirl in the “a” of her signature from the snake in Rousseau’s Dream, turning its connotation of Eve’s danger and temptation into a gesture of irreverent delight.

Lucia’s overarching theme was freedom—expressed through immediacy, change, and movement, and a merging of the figurative and decorative. She achieved the latter by blending Eastern and Western traditions in dynamic, flat patterns that reference both Islamic and Byzantine art she experienced in her youth in the Middle East as well as her textile design background. Her works from the War years reflect not only her own 1938 flight from Europe but also a broader meditation on humanity’s resistance to oppression: paths stretch into the unknown (sometimes becoming towering angels), spectral figures move fluidly between terrestrial and celestial realms, and a ship sails beneath a coral reef. In the late 1940s, Lucia often used architecture as a compositional framework. In Invaded City (1948), the walls of a European town appear graffitied in floral and geometric designs—as if the interior mosaics of a Byzantine church had turned outward—while spirits fly overhead. The title plays on a double invasion—by war and art. In Everyone Was a Church Within Himself (1948), Lucia depicted the facade or chapels of a Moorish-Baroque church, with women occupying every shrine and archway—as mothers with babies, angels, saints, queens, muses, and dancers. The title suggests a vision of individual spirituality within a universal humanity. Featuring only women, the work imagines a new all-female pantheon.